A Look Into the Future of Midtown Manhattan

April 26, 2013

To the Editor:

Robert A. M. Stern (“A Modern City in East Midtown?,” Op-Ed, April 22) is right to question the sensibility of New York City’s going ahead with increased building bulk in an area that is already at a very high density and has significant, historically important architecture.

More than 150 years ago, the city had leadership that looked beyond the immediate future by doing exactly the opposite, creating a new Central Park with zero density in which squatters and close-knit dwellings were replaced by needed open space.

If the city had also done that 50 years ago instead of supporting the construction of the Pan Am Building behind Grand Central Terminal, we could have had a magnificent urban plaza providing prime open space in a very dense area.

The urge to upzone an already overcrowded city center, mostly for revenue purposes, needs to be strongly tempered by a more humanistic approach.

PETER SAMTON New York, April 25, 2013

The writer is the architect.

To the Editor:

A case against new buildings in East Midtown rests in part on a fearful supposition that the area’s mass transit cannot transport people to and from potentially new megastructures. The concern is that if you build them, not that they won’t come, but that they can’t come.

Jungyeon Roh

But it is untrue to think that our city planners are sitting back and doing nothing to upgrade transit support systems. Beyond the new subway lines under construction that will redistribute people’s movements significantly, changes are coming to Grand Central Terminal’s underground.

The Long Island Rail Road’s new East Side Access terminal will introduce numerous street connections and a possible new passageway from its own concourse directly to the Lexington Avenue subway so that the overcrowding above can be eased. And the main turnstile areas serving the Lex will be reconfigured along with new vertical connections added.

Rezoning doesn’t happen in a vacuum; city planning accounts for many support systems beyond just buildings.

STEVEN P. SCALICI Staten Island, April 22, 2013

The writer is a transportation engineer.

To the Editor:

Robert A. M. Stern argues against additional construction in East Midtown, based on his claim that Midtown’s infrastructure is simply too overburdened to support new office buildings. I live in West Midtown, and I think that the west side of Midtown is far more congested.

More broadly, Mr. Stern’s density-phobia has been tried and found wanting. For nearly a century, politicians have used zoning to restrict urban development and used highways to develop suburbia, arguing that cities were too congested.

A result was that instead of being vanquished, congestion spread to suburbia, while restrictions on housing supply caused sky-high urban housing prices.